


Butterfly Effect

by Zai42



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, S1 Bad Ending, The Hive Wins AU, ambiguous death scenes, canon-typical worms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 00:59:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13559328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zai42/pseuds/Zai42
Summary: Martin saves a spider. Things get wildly out of hand from there.





	Butterfly Effect

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to take a break from screaming about canon, come hang with me and scream about Jane Prentiss. Might add more, but I kind of like the ambiguous ending if I'm being honest.

"Jon, we were wondering if--oh, don't kill it!" Jon glanced up, feeling unreasonably guilty as Martin took the rolled up statement from his hands. He straightened it out, took Jon's empty teacup from his desk and gently brushed the (massive) spider into it, covering it with his palm before looking at Jon with reproachful eyes. "I _told_ you you can come and get me, I don't mind taking them outside."

  
"I--I thought you'd gone for lunch," Jon lied. "Uh. Sorry."

  
"Well, you shouldn't be killing the poor things, anyway," Martin said. "I think they might be eating the worms. Anyway, Sasha and I were going to order out, did you want anything?"

  
"Ah...all right. Fine." Jon paused on his way out the door. "Oh...recording ends."

* * *

 

"I think there's less of them around, lately," Sasha said, grinding the toe of her boot into a lone silver worm. She kicked at the dirt to scrape away the smear of gore it left behind. "Maybe she's given up?"

  
They were standing out in front of the Institute, perhaps a week after the forgotten spider incident. There did seem to be fewer worms around than there had been, but the idea that Prentiss had terrorized them for months and then simply walked away didn't make any sense.

  
"Maybe," Jon said. He didn't sound entirely convinced. "Just be careful."

* * *

 

It was just over a month later when it happened. It was getting towards the end of the day, and the assistants had congregated around Tim's desk to debate the odds of Jon actually joining them should they invite him out for drinks later in the week.

  
"I mean if anyone could use it--" Tim had started to say, and then the first scream shattered the peaceful atmosphere.

  
"What the--"

  
"That was Jon!"

  
There was another scream, and the sound of something heavy crashing to the floor, and Sasha bolted towards Jon's office, Tim and Martin close on her heels. She slammed into the door, tugging ineffectively at it. "It's locked--Jon! Hang on!" Behind the door, the screaming had given way to a choked, wet, gurgling sound. For a few moments, Sasha struggled with the handle while Martin pounded at the door.

  
"Move!" Tim shoved his way between them, kicking at the door until the lock gave away and the door swung open.

  
Inside the office was a horror show. Every surface was covered in a shimmering layer of writhing silver worms. One of the shelves had collapsed and the desk was toppled over onto its side against the wall, looking for all the world like someone had casually flipped it aside. The tape recorder, half buried in a mass of worms, was still running.

  
And in the middle of the chaos stood Jane Prentiss herself. Jon hung limply in her arms, his eyes rolled back in his skull. Something black and viscous drooled from his mouth, and one arm dangled lifelessly towards the floor, fingers seizing and twitching. Already, the worms had begun to make a home of his flesh, squirming in and out of him, blood oozing sluggishly out of the holes they made.

  
It took only a second, maybe less, to take in the scene. Then Prentiss lifted her gaze from Jon's face to take in the intruders--though with what, they couldn't be sure, because her eyes were long gone. _"You..."_ she rasped, straightening and turning to face them more fully. Without her holding him up, Jon collapsed to the floor, where he was swarmed in an instant.

  
"Oh, God..." Martin's voice was high and breathy and terrified, and Tim jerked back to himself when he heard it.

  
"RUN!" He grabbed Martin and Sasha's wrists, dragging them behind him until he felt them stop resisting and follow him.

  
"But Jon--!"

  
"You saw him!" Tim yelled. "He was _gone!_ Just go!"

  
"Where are the fire extinguishers?" Sasha demanded as they turned a corner. Then: "Look out!"

  
The shelves did not collapse so much as they exploded, shrapnel and worms and now-shredded boxes of statements showering down on them. In the chaos, they were separated, each fleeing in a different direction.

* * *

 

The worms must have gotten into the wood of the shelving units _months_ ago, breeding and multiplying and compromising their integrity until they could detonate them like grenades. Which, Tim mused as he yanked a 6-inch splinter from his shoulder, they were making excellent tactical use of. If someone had asked him when this started if he thought he could outsmart a swarm of worms, his answer likely would have been yes.

  
He was starting to reconsider that.

  
He'd managed to stumble upon a cache of fire extinguishers--clearly Martin had been stashing them at strategic points throughout the Archive. He only hoped the others had found some too--not that it seemed to be doing him much good.

  
More worms forced themselves up through the floorboards even as he killed those that had already surfaced. They just kept _coming,_ in endless waves, and Tim was worried he would run out of gas long before he could make it to an exit. Instead, the wall to his left exploded. He cried out, spraying blindly into the debris, but it wasn't enough.

  
Sasha had said she hadn't felt the one thin worm that had eaten its way into her, but Tim certainly felt it when several dozens of them fell upon him.

* * *

 

Sasha was bleeding. She didn't _think_ she'd lost her eye, but it was hard to tell; the worst of the shrapnel had hit her face, and even if the eye were still there, there was enough blood that she didn't want to open it.

  
That wasn't important. She'd managed to escape the Archives. She was away from the worst of the infestation. She could get help, she just had to find someone, think of something.

  
She collapsed against a wall, leaving a smear of blood where her hand touched it. Out of the corner of her eye, on the opposite wall, she saw a splash of red, and for a moment she was worried that the rest of the Institute was in the same state of chaos as the Archives--but no. She blinked away some of the blurriness in her good eye and realized the red wasn't blood, but a fire alarm.

  
That could work. Get everyone out. Maybe kick on the suppression system.

  
She limped over to the alarm, but as she lifted her arm to pull it, there was a soft, sweet humming in the back of her brain.

  
_You don't want that,_ went the hum, in a tone both musical and discordant. _Then they'll all run away. We want them to stay, don't we? We want to sing to them._

  
"Oh my God!" said a voice behind her. "Are you all right? Sasha, is that you?"

  
Rosie. Rosie's voice. She sounded so concerned. Why? Was it the blood? It wasn't much blood. There was no reason to worry.

  
Sasha turned. She _had_ lost the eye, it turned out, but that was all right. It just made more room for the Swarm.

  
Rosie screamed, but it did no good.

* * *

 

The document room was _supposed_ to be soundproof. Martin remembered that much. It just didn't seem to be helping.

  
He had checked every inch of himself for worms, and had found none, but that--that _singing_ was still echoing in his ears, low and almost buzzing, a million insect wings beating in harmony. They wanted him to open the door. They wanted to prove he had nothing to fear from them.

  
Martin rather disagreed, but they still sang. He would just have to wait, and hope one of the others had escaped to get help. Or, at the very least, that they hadn't suffered Jon's fate.

  
The thought made Martin shudder, his throat tightening. _No one_ deserved that, and Jon may have been, on occasion, cold or abrasive, but seeing him dripping with gore and filth...and then to _leave_ him, clearly still alive even if it was only just barely...

  
Tim was right, of course. Jon was gone. There had been no saving him. But Martin still felt guilty, leaving him to die alone in that cramped, defiled office.

  
Something in the tenor of the wormsong shifted, then. Became deeper. There was a slow knock on the door, and Martin scrambled away from it.

  
"Martin," came a voice, and Martin's eyes widened in horror. That wasn't Jane Prentiss on the other side of the door. "It's all right," said Jon, his voice warped and twisted but still recognizably his. "Open the door."

  
Martin clenched his hands into tight fists. He hoped, for Jon's sake if nothing else, that he was just hallucinating. Gone slightly mad from stress and terror. That was preferable to the alternative. "You're dead. You died." His voice trembled, and he certainly didn't bother trying to project through the soundproofing, but the voice responded anyway:

  
"I didn't. Open the door and let me show you."

  
It was guilt, clearly. Stress and terror and guilt. Martin buried his face in his hands. "Go _away,"_ he begged. "I--I'm sorry I left you. I didn't--"

  
Jon laughed, then. It echoed strangely, like two slightly out-of-sync tracks playing at once. "Oh, Martin. I forgive you. It's going to be all right. Just come out. This doesn't have to go like last time."

  
Last time. Last time, Martin hadn't had been able to see out his front door at the thing knocking on it. He crept up towards the door, trying to be stealthy. The window had a healthy patina of grime on it, but as he got closer, he could see Jon.

  
Jon was staring directly at him. His eyes were still intact--if anything, they seemed more vibrant than before, glittering out of his pallid face like beacons. His skin had become a papery grey color, riddled with holes filled with writhing wormflesh. It was remarkable, really, how quickly he had come to look like a walking corpse, considering how it seemed to have taken Prentiss herself a longer time. Martin wondered if it had anything to do with whatever that black, oily fluid was that she had pumped into him. If she had...sped the process along. If she had been that eager to make a Hive out of him.

  
Martin realized with a start that he was crying, and pressed a hand to his mouth to stifle a sob.

  
Jon's expression didn't quite match up with his words. He had sounded amused, mocking, but his face was cast into something like concern, his eyes pinning Martin like a butterfly. As he spoke again, his expression twisted further, a brief look of horror crossing his features. "The others are caught," he said, and his voice was just as melodic as and awful as it had been, with no hint of the dread that colored his countenance. "This place cannot protect you. Not for long. Not anymore."

  
And like that, Martin knew he would open the door, eventually. No one was coming for him, no one had escaped to bring in the cavalry. Soon he would give in to this thing that used to be the Head Archivist--that maybe still was, somewhere beneath all the filth, somewhere the worms hadn't yet touched--and walk out into the seething army of worms Prentiss had brought into the Institute.

  
Not yet. He swore he'd at least hold out as long as he could, for as long as his frayed sanity would allow, but soon. And in the meantime, Jon would whisper to him through the door.

* * *

 

Several floors up, Elias Bouchard was having a bit of a day.

  
He hadn't thought that the Flesh Hive would prove to be this much of a _problem,_ if he were being honest. He had foreseen Prentiss' inevitable attack as destined to fail--oh, sure, maybe they would lose and assistant or two (his money had been on Martin, frankly), and the Archivist would be badly shaken, but that had all been accounted for. Hell, if Jon went and had a mental breakdown afterwards, that might even work out to Elias' advantage, if he played his cards right.

  
_This_ madness was more than he had planned for.

  
The Archivist was _not intended_ to become a _goddamned Flesh Hive._

  
And now Sasha had gone and started infecting people on the main floor. Rosie was a ticking time bomb of skin and worms, just waiting to go the way of poor Harriet Lee. And clever, level-headed Sasha was doing an _excellent_ job of playing up her horrifically injured appearance to get people to rush to her aid; Rosie had been the first, but there were at least two more and Sonja was well on her way to becoming a Hive herself, provided she lived through the process.

  
This had to end.

  
He had been keeping a few spare CO2 canisters in his office for this inevitability, though he had hoped he wouldn't need them. He grabbed two and started towards the door of his office when the knob began to turn; he retreated back behind his desk, kicked it over to act as a barricade (probably not particularly effective, but it would have to do), and readied the fire extinguisher, aiming it at the slowly opening door.

  
Jane Prentiss sauntered in as if she owned the place (which, Elias admitted begrudgingly, was not very far off from the truth at the moment). She regarded him with an amused smile playing upon her ruined mouth. A worm squiggled in and out of her cheek, and Elias felt his own lip curl in disgust.

  
"How did you manage to sneak up on me?" he asked. No point in lying about it. He wanted answers, pride be damned.

  
Prentiss laughed, cold and viscerally unpleasant, like getting gutter water down the back of your neck. "Your Eyes are...clouded," she said. "Distracted. So much chaos in this... _hallowed_ place." The disdain in her tone was palpable. "It...confuses you."

  
Elias snarled, hefting the fire extinguisher, but Prentiss waved a finger at him. "I...wouldn't."

  
"Why. Not."

  
"Your Archivist would not survive."

  
She was right about that much. Still. "I can find a _new one,"_ Elias snapped. "It would be _kinder."_

  
"Are you certain...?" Prentiss asked. Her voice had taken on a dreamy, singsongy quality. "He took them so _well..._ he truly wanted to _understand..."_

  
Certainly the mark of an Archivist, but Elias had started from the ground up once already. Doing so again was an unpleasant prospect to be sure, but so was _this._ He didn't lower his weapon. "You do not belong here. Why even come here?"

  
Prentiss laughed again. "Your _Archivist._ His pretty, helpless _assistants._ They... _listen._ They _hear."_ Elias was suddenly aware of the thick squelching noises that had been filling the air. His office floor was a carpet of worms, slowly inching closer to him. "Do...you...hear...their...song?"

  
Elias unleashed a burst of gas, killing the worms closest to him, though he was careful not to aim too much towards Prentiss herself. They died with a sound like a musical note abruptly cut off. Prentiss slouched forward, reaching out, covering Elias' hand with her own, and lowering the nozzle of the extinguisher. None of her worms made a move to leap at him.

  
"Stay here, with all your Eyes..." Prentiss purred. "We...will not touch you...unless you ask." Elias growled, jerking away from her touch. "Stay, and we keep the pretty Archivist. Have your place of power, but we will have our place beneath it and inside it and you will work around us."

  
This was _not ideal._

  
"Or we will eat you."

  
Elias let out a slow breath through his nose. Not ideal.

  
But he could live with it.

  
For now.


End file.
